Yusuf ibn Tashfin

c. 1009 - 1106 CE

Berber Almoravid ruler of the Maghreb and Al-Andalus. Founded Marrakech. Crossed the strait in 1086 at the desperate appeal of the Andalusi taifa kings and shattered Alfonso VI's army at Zallaqa. Extended Muslim rule in Iberia by 400 years.

Life

Yusuf ibn Tashfin was a Berber Sanhaja chief of the Almoravid movement, a religious-military brotherhood founded on strict Maliki Sunni observance and the desert austerity of the Sahara. He rose through the movement, defeated rival Berber and Arab powers across the Maghreb, and by the 1070s ruled a state that stretched from Senegal to the Mediterranean. He founded the city of Marrakech in 1070 as his capital.

By 1085 the Andalusi taifa kings, weakened by division and heavy tribute payments to the Christian kings of the north, had lost Toledo to Alfonso VI of Castile-Leon. Alfonso styled himself "Emperor of all the Spains" and made clear his intention to take the rest.

The taifa kings, humiliated, sent a delegation to Yusuf ibn Tashfin. The delegation reached Marrakech in the winter of 1085. Yusuf agreed to cross the strait, but only under his own command and only on his own terms.

He crossed in 1086 with a Berber army disciplined and grim. Alfonso VI, arrogant, met him at Sagrajas (Zallaqa) on 23 October 1086 with a force of perhaps 60,000 Christian troops including French crusaders. Yusuf's army broke Alfonso's line. The Christian dead were counted in tens of thousands. Alfonso himself escaped wounded with a fraction of his host. The Reconquista was halted for four hundred years.

Yusuf annexed the taifa kingdoms progressively over the following decade, replacing their local dynasties with Almoravid governance. When he died in 1106 at nearly a hundred years old, the whole of Muslim Al-Andalus and the Maghreb was under a single Berber-Muslim state.

Stories

Each story below is drawn from the classical Islamic historical sources.